Free Courses

Accounting

Financial Accounting FundamentalsThis course will teach you the tools you'll need to understand the fundamentals of financial accounting. Concise videos, the financial records of a small business, and "your turn" activities guide you through the three most commonly used financial statements: the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement, and the Statement of Cash Flows. Beyond recording transactions, you'll learn how to prepare these financial statements, and read and analyze them to draw basic conclusions about a company's financial health.

Managerial Accounting FundamentalsThis course will teach you the fundamentals of managerial accounting including how to navigate the financial and related information managers need to help them make decisions. You'll learn about cost behavior and cost allocation systems, how to conduct cost-volume-profit analysis, and how to determine if costs and benefits are relevant to your decisions.

Design Thinking & Innovation

Design Thinking for InnovationUse design thinking to become an innovative thinker and uncover creative opportunities to solve the types of challenges facing today’s organizations. Learn how different organizations use design thinking to uncover compelling solutions.

Design Thinking for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social SectorDo you work for a nonprofit or in the social sector? Are you struggling to solve the problems and meet the needs of the people you serve? Come learn more about how design thinking, a human-centered approach to problem solving, can help you truly understand an issue, generate ideas worth testing and iterate to find solutions that make a real difference. Through global stories from areas as diverse as government, health care, and education, we’ll show you the tools, techniques and mindset needed to use design thinking to uncover new and creative solutions in the social sector. The development of this course was supported by the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

Leadership & Management

Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Parts I and IIHow do you successfully grow an existing private business? Enter these courses, which draw on Professor Edward Hess’ research and 30 years of real-world experience advising private growth companies to learn how.

Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Part IPart I focuses on the common growth challenges faced by existing private businesses. This course will challenge how you think about growth, plus give you tools to help plan for growth, assess the preconditions to grow and manage the risks of growth.

New Models of Business in SocietyProfessor R. Edward Freeman discusses the emergence of a new story about business, within a societal framework. Almost every business creates or destroys value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and society, in addition to shareholders and other stakeholders. Profits and stakeholder value go together, and this course explains how.

Getting Started: Agile Meets Design ThinkingLearn how to use agile and design thinking to deliver valuable solutions. We’ll look at how these two disciplines are at a critical convergence point and what that means for successful practice.

Running Product Design SprintsLearn how to give yourself just enough time and just the right focus to integrate quality design and testing into your projects. Learn how to establish situation-appropriate plans to avoid waste and deliver value. This may mean testing user motivation, interface usability or solution fit.

Managing an Agile TeamWhat are the day-to-day tools you’ll need as an agile manager? Learn the fundamental tools of agile management and how to apply them.

Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time. This course, also led by Alex Cowan, will help you along your learning journey.

This popular foundational course covers the key concepts of planning and executing projects. You will learn how to identify factors that lead to project success, as well as how to plan, analyze and manage projects. In addition, you will learn about state-of-the-art methodologies and how to consider the challenges of various types of projects.

Now more than ever, corporations are investing heavily in IT. The quality of these investments affect the daily work of millions, yet it’s not uncommon to see industry surveys where the failure rates for IT projects is over 50%. It’s possible to do better and it’s possible to do so consistently. In this two-week course, we’ll step through major challenges within corporate IT and how to address them with the disciplined use of design thinking, Lean Startup, and agile as a team framework.

Have you ever gotten really excited about reading or writing a business plan? You might have started out excited, but I’m going to bet you didn’t stay that way. Let’s be honest–business plans are boring and mostly ignored. The beauty of the one-page Business Model Canvas is that it drives meaningful focus. It helps us organize our ideas and have better discussions by forcing specificity and bringing linkages between key business drivers to the foreground. Innovation requires one hand being very focused on a fundamental need or problem while the other hand quickly tests different solutions. For this, the Business Model Canvas is very innovation friendly: it's a lot easier to tweak the model and try things with something that's sitting on a single page. In this course, you’ll learn key tools from the worlds of design thinking and Lean Startup to approach the Canvas with thoughtfulness, focus, and above all a test-driven approach to business model innovation.

Are you trying to understand data from your research? Learn how and when to conduct mediation, moderation, and conditional indirect effects analyses? Or, perhaps, how to theorize and test your theoretical models? If so, this is the course for you! We will walk you through the steps of conducting multilevel analyses using a real dataset and provide articles and templates designed to facilitate your learning. You'll leave with the tools you need to analyze and interpret the results of the datasets you collect as a researcher.

Strategy, Ethics & Entrepreneurship

Business Strategy SpecializationBuild your strategic analysis skills and advance your career in this specialization’s practical, skill-building courses. Gain the tools to lead your organization through a changing environment, build and sustain competitive advantage, formulate and assess business strategies, and align efforts to optimize organizational strategy.

Foundations of Business StrategyDevelop your ability to think strategically, analyze the competitive environment, and recommend firm positioning and value creation. Explore the underlying theory and frameworks of a business strategy.

Advanced Business StrategyLearn to analyze strategy across time, industries, geographies and institutions. Complete a comprehensive evaluation and understand the strategy dynamics of an industry.

Business Growth StrategyGet the tools you need to analyze, evaluate and recommend specific actions organizations can take to grow their value. Avoid common growth pitfalls and determine how best to build value.

Strategic Planning and ExecutionLead, organize and implement a successful strategy-setting process for an organization. Learn to align efforts across the organization, conduct research, and ensure planning and budgeting support the organization’s strategy.

Ethical Leadership Through Giving Voice to ValuesThis course offers an action-oriented introduction to Giving Voice to Values (or GVV), an exciting new approach to values-driven leadership development in the workplace, in business education and in life.

GVV is not about persuading people to be more ethical, but instead it starts from the premise that most of us already want to act on our values, but that we also want to feel that we have a reasonable chance of doing so effectively. Through positive, real life examples, pre-scripting, rehearsal and peer coaching, GVV builds the skill, the confidence and likelihood that we will act on our values more often and more successfully. Based on research and practice, with over 1,000 pilots in educational settings and companies on all seven continents, GVV helps answer the questions: “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?”

You will come away from this course with an expanded toolkit, as well as practice, in a variety of methods and techniques for voicing and enacting your own values and principle. You will develop and practice leadership skills in "peer coaching” with other Learners. Through cases and stories based on recognizable workplace, classroom and life values conflicts, you will apply the GVV techniques and “re-frames”, expanding your repertoire for possible action as well as identifying and rehearsing responses that are likely to be most effective. Through this practice, you will gain greater confidence and competence in voicing and enacting your values effectively.

Pricing Strategy Optimization SpecializationIn this Specialization, we show you techniques to increase price realization and maximize profits. Learn from The Boston Consulting Group's global pricing experts and University of Virginia Darden School of Business faculty, who share the frameworks, tips and tools we use in our business and research environments. We will look at pricing through BCG's proprietary and time-tested three “lenses”—cost and economics, customer value, and competition—to build your understanding of the strategic power of pricing.

Cost and Economics in Pricing StrategyHow much should you charge for your products and services? Traditionally, businesses have answered this question based on the cost to produce or provide their goods and services. This course shows you the economic factors behind pricing based on cost and the pros and cons of a cost-based pricing approach.

Customer Value in Pricing StrategyThe traditional approach to pricing based on costs works to pay the bills, but it leaves revenue on the table. You can, in fact, price your products in a way that increases sales--if you know what your customers are willing to pay and can leverage psychology to create better deal and discount plans. In this course, we'll show you how to price a product based on how your customers value it and the psychology behind their purchase decisions.

Market and Competition in Pricing StrategyIf you haven’t considered what the competition is charging, you may not be maximizing your revenue. Spend time analyzing the market and you can influence price and improve margins. In this course, we'll show you how to implement competitive pricing and avoid common legal pitfalls of market-based pricing. You will also learn how to predict, influence and respond to competitors’ pricing moves.

Paid Courses

Our paid courses and executive education programs are practitioner-oriented, providing an opportunity to engage with your classmates while you complete flexible and personalized assignments. Each course includes trained mentors and peer review.

Design Thinking and Innovation SpecializationDarden’s four-course specialization empowers you to become a creative catalyst with a systemic approach to innovation. This hands-on training in the core principles of design thinking and leadership will help you solve your business challenges.

Design Thinking Part I: Insights to InspirationPart I of our two-part project-based course is taught by Professor Jeanne Liedtka, an internationally recognized leader in design thinking. Lay the groundwork for great ideas by asking “What Is?” Strengthen your innovation mindset and learn research techniques to jumpstart new and inspired ideas.

Design Thinking Part II: Ideas to ActionIn Part II of our project-based course taught by Professor Jeanne Liedtka, you'll ask "What if?" as a way to discover the best ideas to generate solutions to your challenge. You'll ask "What wows?" and focus on "What works?" by bringing your ideas face-to-face with stakeholders.

Discovery ToolsLearn to use five human-centered design tools. Connect with your customers on a human level, to get beyond what they say and observe what they do so you'll recognize unarticulated needs and capture overlooked ideas.

Creating The Innovative WorkplaceLearn to build a workplace that makes innovation the norm. Ready yourself to lead a high performance team, leverage your social networks, and manage organizational and personal changes associated with innovation and learning.

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